Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Meg Gardiner

Meg Gardiner was born in Oklahoma and raised in Santa Barbara, California. She graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School.

Gardiner practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California Santa Barbara. She’s a former collegiate cross-country runner and a three time Jeopardy! champion. She divides her time between London and Austin, Texas.

Her new stand-alone thriller is Phantom Instinct.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Gardiner's reply:
I’m a judge for the 2015 Edgar Awards, so am reading a fantastic selection of mysteries… about which I am sworn to confidentiality. Let’s just say that I’m lucky, and readers who love suspense novels have a wonderful selection of books to choose from this year.

I’m also reading Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. It’s a history of America’s nuclear weapons program, and it’s riveting. The Manhattan Project, the Cold War, the Strategic Air Command, the Cuban Missile Crisis—the book brings home how we’ve lived on a knife-edge for decades. The Damascus accident deals not with Syria, but with a Titan II missile buried in a silo in Arkansas. In 1980 a maintenance accident caused a leak of explosive fuel. The missile’s 9 megaton warhead had three times the explosive power of all the bombs dropped in WWII. The struggle to prevent catastrophe is grippingly told.
Visit Meg Gardiner's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue